EDITORIAL: You wouldn’t think there was a link between the legal framework governing commercial vehicles in a country – especially non-implementation of one – and the prospect of dividends from securing trade routes in strategically positioned landlocked countries.

Yet it turns out that the government’s failure to implement an axle load control regime on motorways is not only contributing to the 35,000-odd lives lost on highways every year, but also to the Rs75 billion spent annually on road repair.

What’s more, according to a research report – Laws Related to Commercial Vehicles – carried out by Ziauddin University and sponsored by the Fleet Operators Association of Pakistan (FOAP), there’s a disconcerting “lack of harmony among provincial laws governing commercial vehicles, leading to implementation difficulties”.

Apparently, this “disjointed approach” has led to Pakistan’s exclusion from the logistics performance index since 2018, yet it doesn’t seem to have bothered anybody in Islamabad; at least not enough to do something about it.

Ironically, this report has come out just as Pakistan is flirting with the idea of extending trade routes into central Asian states.

But since very strict Euro-5 and Euro-6 standards apply in those countries, and we’ve done nothing to sort out our own laws to ensure even minimum compliance, these efforts are sure to hit a brick wall soon enough and all the planning would amount, as usual, to wasted time.

It’s not as if nobody’s known about this problem. The wear and tear of national highways has been taking lives, wasting money and causing trouble for years. Most countries follow the conventional model where the cheapest form of transport is on water, followed by rail, road, and air.

But this has never worked for us because we’ve never leveraged the extensive river network that we were naturally blessed with and the railways department has been a story of unparalleled rot and waste anywhere in the developing world in the last half century.

That leaves mostly roads to accommodate the 300,000 commercial vehicles operating in the country “and contributing significantly to the GDP and employment”.

Yet now experts are warning the further failure to form and implement a cohesive regulatory system will bring serious harm to local commercial activity and even limit the potential benefits of CPEC (China Pakistan Economic Corridor).

That would be an utter national tragedy. Already we’re making trouble for the Chinese by failing to honour contracts and repeatedly begging for loan rollovers. To let CPEC fizzle out as well just because we’re unable to get our own basic laws right would be going too far.

These are times of extreme economic/financial fragility. And you’d expect the government to go the extra mile to generate value and plug leakages.

Yet here we are, compromising our own trade potential and wasting billions of rupees every year and still not addressing the root cause, which relates to an unforgivable inability to implement laws.

This is unacceptable. This report should jolt the government into immediate action. Hopefully, it will not need to be reminded of the urgency of such matters.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024